Your best option in such a situation is to keep working, keep collecting testimonials, and work inexorably towards opening your own business in the same field. This is the only situation where you can put your experience and talents to full use without suffering from the debacle of lack of qualifications. And if worst comes to worst, you can always hire an employee with stellar qualifications to compensate any lack you feel in projecting the image of your business.
In almost every field of work, we do hear of and recognize independent contractors and vendors who are self-taught, but held as benchmarks in the industry. However, each of them had a journey of constant struggle, winning over personal barriers, and gathering hands-on-experience. In short, they succeeded in building a reputation that was sufficient to overcome their lack of qualifications and still establish them as experts.
The journey is rarely smooth, and rarely done from remote association. Lack of qualifications can be overcome only with proof of work-experience and stellar delivery. Moreover, lack of formal qualifications can be compensated by taking courses and acquiring degrees or diplomas through long-distance education. However, all the while, you need to be working, and you need to be at one job or another that are in your field of choice and aligned with your long-term career goals. Your destined lot will probably be with a series of low-paying jobs until you can gather enough work-experience and achievement records on your resume to be recognized as an expert.
While, for people with formal qualifications it is sufficient to build up a resume, for people without formal qualifications, building a resume is insufficient, but they need to build a presence. That presence is built by being member of professional social networks and regularly, as well as constructively, making your presence felt in forums, blogs, and other social media. Nothing prevents you from having your own well-organized website and blog, even with one through which you can declare your expertise and solicit for work.
You may not go into business right away, but building a presence in the profession involves continuous nurturing of an image and online activities are the least time consuming when it comes to such efforts. Due to the nature of search engines and algorithms, as well as visitor mentality, it will be a long time before the online community starts being able to find you and recognize you. During this inevitable period of gestation, it is foolhardy to stake your livelihood on your online presence. You must always be on a job or contract of employment with employers while you keep building your presence on the side. If you plan your moves, and work smart, the day will come when you can take that final step of going independent and shift from being an employee to being an employer.
Being a self-employed person is the same as running a business; only most people don’t recognize that and suffer the consequences. Like all money-yielding activity, running a business takes skills and experience that are qualitatively different from your professional working skills. Conducting a successful business requires many activities that may be totally outside the purview of your present skills, and you need to learn them, experience them, and test the waters thoroughly before going independent. This is why being in jobs and sticking with jobs is important for those who lack formal qualifications and want to strike out independently in fields of their choice.
